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Apple Wins VT in Cost. vs. Performance
danigiri writes "Detailed notes about a presentation at Virginia Tech are posted by by an attending student. copied most of the slides of the facts presentation and wrote down their comments. He wrote some insightful notes and info snippets, like the fact that Apple gave the cheapest deal of machines with chassis, beating Dell, IBM, HP. They are definitely going to use some in-house fault-tolerance software to prevent the odd memory-bit error on such a bunch of non-error-tolerant RAM and any other hard or soft glitches. The G5 cluster will be accepting first apps around-November."
mfago adds, "Apple beat Dell, IBM and others based on Cost vs. Performance alone, and it will run Mac OS X because 'there is not enough support for Linux.'"
3 MW power, double redundant with backups - UPS and diesel
1.5 MW reserved for the TCF
2+ million BTUs of cooling capacity using Liebert's extreme density cooling (rack mounted cooling via liquid refrigerant)
traditional methods [fans] would have produced windspeeds of 60+ MPH
One of the primary concerns for a multi-node cluster is insured latency among all components within the cluster. It doesn't have to be the fastest, it just needs to insured exacting timing for latency across all nodes. IBM can do this with their "wormhole" switch routing on SP and has done this with Myranet on their Intel X-series clusters.
m l
From most of my reading with Infiniband, it was designed from the ground up as a NAS style solution, than for large multi-node cluster computing. I'm curious as to if they have any issues with cluster latency.
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/1211sandia.ht
The primary timings and white papers I've seen published for Infiniband have been for small clustered filesystem access. Although it's burst rate is much higher than Myranet, it's hard to find any raw retails for their multiple node latency normalization.
I hope it scales, since Intel's solution appears to be less cost prohibitive than some of the other solutions offered on the market, and would really open up the market even for smaller clusters (16-36 node) for business use.
# 3 MW power, double redundant with backups - UPS and diesel * 1.5 MW reserved for the TCF
# 2+ million BTUs of cooling capacity using Liebert's extreme density cooling (rack mounted cooling via liquid refrigerant) * traditional methods [fans] would have produced windspeeds of 60+ MPH
Seems that they did talk about both.
Okay before we get going with the same discussion about ECC vs. Non ECC, and all the flames start from people perusing slashdot who think they are more in the know than the PhD's at VT who have been working on this for months I want to point a few things out.
1. The majority if not all of the bit errors that ECC corrects are caused by thermal noise. Thermal noise is an issue in a cluster of rack mounted 1U units due to the difficulty of cooling such tightly spaced units generating so much heat in so small a space. It is not an issue in a cluster of DESKTOP machines utilizing a Liebert system with way more cooling capacity than is needed.
2. Even if somehow a none-thermal bit error occurs, each node has 4GB RAM. The probability of it being in an OS or application critical (especially given the converging nature of many long running calculations) piece of RAM as opposed to an empty piece of RAM is small.
How many of you are reading this from a desktop without ECC RAM that has an obnoxiously huge uptime? ECC is a non-issue in a well-cooled cluster of desktop cased machines.
Certain things are easy to imagine in large quantities, but dude.
Just....dude....
Kick in the Head
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
for any represantation, you need only 1 graphics card : the one the monitor is attached to. Parallelizing realtime display-only stuff is not much good since you'd lose to much time in data transmission.
So they could equip one G5 with a radeon9800 and let that one display the results. No need to buy another 1099 Radeons.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The viriginia folks must have one huge room with some massive air handlers to circulate the air that will be trapped behind the towering walls of 1000 4U boxes.
I don't know any more than what's publicly availble, but the VT follks in the know have said that they've designed a specialized, liquid based cooling system precisely because of the issues wrt cooling this many units. The FA makes reference to this many units generating windspeeds of 60mph from fans alone.
I am gonna guess that behind each G5 rack will be a radiator type arrangement, with cooled pipes flowing with a liquid that will carry the heat away from the internal airspace, much like a large car radiator. I don't know if that would be cost-effective, or what it would take to move that much liquid, or if the radiator could be made to transfer enough heat fast enough. Maybe the liquid cooling units actually replace the internal fans directly. Who knows--I think we'll get some more details on this this week as the G5s start to come out of their boxes. They've apparently received about 10% of them already.
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$tar -xvf
Man they really blew it. They should have ordered it from macmall. it would have come with 1000 free printers and 1000 ipod cases.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I believe you can get a VT for well under $1000, and I've even heard that some of them now support advanced "sixel" graphics.
And they scroll MUCH more smoothly than OS X.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why go to the trouble of porting linux to the G5 when you could port the clustering code to OS X and be done with it. Seems like a much simpler task and more cost effective use of labor.
Read on. They're putting 8GB of RAM in each machine.
As an American company, Dell is a huge disgrace. Please read the "Environmental Report Card" produced by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition. Dell received a failing grade and is little better than Taiwanese companies, which are notorious for destroying the environment and the health of workers. Dell even resorted to prison labor to implement its pathetic recycling program.
I bet at the time of initial consideration of vendors, there were no competitive Opteron or Itanium solutions (none with chassis, the slides say), and I am also willing to bet that Apple had at least a hardware prototype they could demonstrate, at least a motherboard + dual CPU setup, even if the chassis was incomplete and the not all the major subsystems were 100%
Just enough to demonstrate that Apple *would* have a solution, and enough that VT could narrow down the decision to a possible, pending the actual production and purchase of a single machine... then, the contract being 99% complete, they just had to sign a couple papers and purchase, overnight, 1,100 dual G5s.
On the flip side I bet they had a similar contract in the wings with other vendors, all pending on 'simple' bottlenecks.
GPL Deconstructed